@TomV-TeamMonica It's a game intended to bring peer pressure into the estimation process. You're supposed to come to a consensus on the pointing. The idea is that everybody is now invested in the estimates and is thus motivated to feel personally attacked by the party tasked with implementation argues the toss when it turns out to be a can of worms. If you've ever seen Private Benjamin or Full Metal jacket, you can then punish the team if any of the estimates are wrong.

The first story we needed to score was something for which the architecture isn't decided yet, so I said "40" (whatever that means, it was my first time doing this, and I just pulled up the wikipedia link so I could pretend I knew what I was doing)

Roughly translating to days or half days of effort, depending on how you calibrate the process. Although technically it's not supposed to be a concrete time estimate, that's how it tends to get treated.

I've seen a theory on this to the effect that you should always go with the highest estimate because the party coming up with that is the most likely to have put some thought into what's involved in the implementation.

Also, there is a server component and a native mobile app, there were stories for the backend and stories for the frontend, why would you allow a backend dev to estimate a frontend change and the other way round?

one of the ways i've seen the time drain addressed in the past is to chargeback meeting time to managers. you take the average hourly salary in IT and bill managers' expense reports per man-hour in meetings they call

Scrum treats developers as irresponsible code monkeys, assumes a 1:1 mapping between requirements and assumes the value of analysis and design is essentially zero because refactoring. It puts all of the decision making in the hands of the scrum master and whoever is responsible for grooming the backlog. There is a sham process where the business assigns priorities and this is presented as a no-cost decision.

Maybe it works if you don't have toxic narcissists running the show, although (a) this applies to most endeavours and (b) there's something about agile dogma that seems to bring them out of the woodwork.

As part of the rollout of new network site themes, many of the Stack Exchange sites I visit regularly now have links in posts and comments underlined.
Preferring the non-underlined look, and since I primarily use Chrome (68.0.3440.106 (Official Build) (64-bit)) and Edge (42.17692.1004.0), which ...

I have to apologize upfront because I'm that crappy situation where I'm not even sure what the right question to ask is, so sorry if I'm blithering. I've got two big, nasty stored procedures, both of which involve dozens of tables. One is blocking the other - I've got a whole host of evidence to show that. So my question is, now what? Is there any way to narrow down which tables are involved here or do I just have to compare the contents of the two procedures manually?

I'm guessing what you'll see is a combo of transactions being taken early/held too long and inefficient queries

Had a client last week that stumbled upon the pattern of opening a transaction for the duration of every procedure... and trigger. And those triggers had all this workflow in them, not the least of which was sending email. In said transaction and do you know what, it was slow and there was lots of blocking

@PeterVandivier actually, I saw this working well. Very small case (in the end, I was the only one actively coding), with a background that made initial and most later assumptions obsolete or at least half-true quite fast. Still, the output was fairly decent (and not only because I am a brilliant Java developer, which I am totally not)

but all participants wanted to work together nicely and achieve a goal

@PaulWhitesaysGoFundMonica They'd never know as they never checked commit status. But, from my own experience with SSIS and distributed transactions, yes, the emails would "send" and then the rollback happens and why am I not getting error emails!

The words literally went out of my mouth: The email works when the package succeeds. Profiler shows the sendmail waking up for the failures but it's like the transaction's...getting...rolledbackI'manidiot

In set theory, a universal set is a set which contains all objects, including itself. In set theory as usually formulated, the conception of a universal set leads to Russell's paradox and is consequently not allowed. However, some non-standard variants of set theory include a universal set.
== Notation ==
There is no standard notation for the universal set of a given set theory. Common symbols include V, U and ξ.
== Reasons for nonexistence ==
Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory and related set theories, which are based on the idea of the cumulative hierarchy, do not allow for the existence of ...

hth

it has been mathematically proved that it is impossible to have all databases diagrammed